Author
Topic: Volume leveling (auto) (Read 2765 times)

Does anybody know (or feel may be useful) if there are plans to add auto-volume levelling for audio and video files?

This is where the system scans the audio data in a file, and does something like a 95th percentile volume average to estimate the perceived record level, then uses this to calculate a single gain/bias factor for that file and writes this into the database as a new attribute.

During playback, it reads this attribute and uses it to vary the internal volume level of the sound card. In this way it attempts to keep multiple audio/video files playing back to back at approximately the correct/consistent volume level so that you aren't constantly changing your amp's volume to maintain this. It would also be rather easy to have an override where the user can change and fix this value in the database based on their personal preference. This is already a feature of a number of media players available for PC/MAC....

But that's not an answer for LMCE itself! Not everybody has or wants Squeezeboxes... the actual formula for calculating the volume level could be very simple indeed, but then it needs to get written into the database, or a tag (as you suggest) and finally, obeyed by Xine at playback...